Aztec Religion and Art of Writing : : Investigating Embodied Meaning, Indigenous Semiotics, and the Nahua Sense of Reality / / Isabel Laack.

• Author: Laack, Isabel.
• Place / Publishing House: Leiden, , Boston : : BRILL,, 2019.
• Year of Publication: 2019
• Language: English
• Series: Numen Book Series 161.
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (455 pages).

In her groundbreaking investigation from the perspective of the aesthetics of religion, Isabel Laack explores the religion and art of writing of the pre-Hispanic Aztecs of Mexico. Inspired by postcolonial approaches, she reveals Eurocentric biases in academic representations of Aztec cosmovision, ontology, epistemology, ritual, aesthetics, and the writing system to provide a powerful interpretation of the Nahua sense of reality. Laack transcends the concept of “sacred scripture” traditionally employed in religions studies in order to reconstruct the Indigenous semiotic theory and to reveal how Aztec pictography can express complex aspects of embodied meaning. Her study offers an innovative approach to nonphonographic semiotic systems, as created in many world cultures, and expands our understanding of human recorded visual communication. This book will be essential reading for scholars and readers interested in the history of religions, Mesoamerican studies, and the ancient civilizations of the Americas. 'This excellent book, written with intellectual courage and critical self-awareness, is a brilliant, multilayered thought experiment into the images and stories that made up the Nahua sense of reality as woven into their sensational ritual performances and colorful symbolic writing system.' - Davíd Carrasco, Harvard University

Table of Contents

Front Matter -- Copyright Page -- Dedication -- Foreword -- Acknowledgments -- Figures -- Introduction 1 -- 1 Methodology 16 -- 2 Living in Cultural Diversity 59 -- 3 Living in Relation: Being Human in Tenochtitlan 80 -- 4 A World in Motion: Nahua Ontology 109 -- 5 Understanding a World in Motion: Nahua Epistemology 149 -- 6 Interacting with a World in Motion: Nahua Pragmatism and Aesthetics 167 -- 7 Expressing Reality in Language: Nahua Linguistic Theory 203 -- 8 Materializing Reality in Writing: Nahua Pictography 246 -- 9 Understanding Pictography: Interpreting Nahua Semiotics 286 -- 10 Interpretative Results: Nahua Religion, Scripture, and Sense of Reality 342 -- Conclusion 356 -- Figures 365 -- Figure Credits 381 -- Back Matter -- References -- Index.